Section: Application Domains

Automotive propulsion

• The engine (underhood) compartment is a key component of vehicle design, in which the temperature is monitored to ensure the effectiveness and safety of the vehicle, and participates in 5 to 8% of the total drag and CO2 emissions. Dimensioning is an aerodynamic and aerothermal compromise, validated on a succession of road stages at constant speed and stopped phases (red lights, tolls, traffic jam). Although CFD is routinely used for forced convection, state-of-the-art turbulence models are not able to reproduce flows dominated by natural convection during stopped phases, with a Rayleigh number of the order of ${10}^{10}$, such that the design still relies on costly, full-scale, wind tunnel experiments. This technical barrier must be lifted, since the ambition of the PSA group is to reach a full digital design of their vehicles in the 2025 horizon, i.e., to almost entirely rely on CFD. This issue is the focus of the ongoing PhD thesis (CIFRE PSA) of S. Jameel, supervised by R. Manceau, and also a part of the ANR project MONACO_2025 described in section 9.2.2.

• The Power & Vehicles Division of IFPEN co-develops the CFD code CONVERGE to simulate the internal flow in a spark-ignition engine, in order to provide the automotive industry with tools to optimize the design of combustion engines. The RANS method, widely used in the industry, is not sufficiently reliable for quantitative predictions, and is only used as a tool to qualitatively compare different geometries. On the other hand, LES provides more detailed and accurate information, but at the price of a CPU cost unafordable for daily use in the industry. Therefore, IFPEN aims at developing the hybrid RANS/LES methodology, in order to combine the strengths of the two approaches. The just-started PhD thesis of Hassan Afailal, co-supervised by Rémi Manceau, is focused on this issue.